An open letter to my senior management

I wrote an as of today sent this letter to the upper echelons of Pearson Asia Pacific.  Time will tell if I get anything but dead-air and/or platitudes with absolutely no followup.  Still, it felt good to write, and my coworkers are all in agreement... and some even think I don't go far enough.  So yeah.

Should I get no response, my next option will be to find the general company listserv and go populist with the message.

And so, without further ado...

To whom it may concern,

I’d like to pose my concerns regarding the efficacy of the current makeup and revenue-target model. While this has been an annual headache for myself and my coworkers, as we all scramble to account for the hours supposedly “missed” during national holiday leave, I’ve long since stopped beating that dead horse and grudgingly accepted that any and every “holiday” is more or less one extended scheduling aneurysm of 25%-filled makeups, and makeups of makeups, etc. I am not questioning this policy in itself at this time.

Rather, this year seems to have added yet another layer of needless complexity in the form of the “revenue-target” and its incentive structure, as is currently implemented. Let me lay out my own situation, and that of my campus: I am about to go into an 8-day “makeup marathon” which will compile two entire weeks worth of classes into a single stretch of time. At its worst, I’ll be actively teaching – without anything but a lunch break – from 9am until 8:30 at night. My fellow teachers face similar, if not worse, schedules.

We proposed that the makeups, rather than having to be lumped together as previously mentioned, instead be allowed to be spaced out into the first week or two of February, as both a quality of life, and direct quality of teaching issue. This has been what has worked in the past over my 3-plus year tenure here at Pearson, and I didn’t expect there to be much resistance to the same solution this year. Much to my surprise, the idea was deemed unworkable due to the revenue-target system that has been implemented. Under this structure, the local Senior Teacher, Center Manager, and apparently even the Regional Manager would all be directly financially punished if this so-called “target” were not met. This target is, to my knowledge, developed by the financial dept. and senior management, and is continually raised if met – and again, financially punished if a given school underperforms in a given month.

Given this model, for a small, slow-growth school like Chunshen, there is absolutely no room to space classes out over the next month, or for any schedule irregularities whatsoever. Virtually any discrepancy would result in the school falling “under target,” and thereby punishing the local management.

There is, therefore, active pressure on the management to meet this goal. That is understandable. However, there is no such incentive for the teaching staff to do the same.  Consequentially, there is a considerable degree of resentment at being made to compress half a month of classes into a single week.

This is doubly aggravating on a holiday like the upcoming Spring Festival… this is a holiday that happens annually; that is to say, every year. This could have been planned for, this could have been planned around; the monthly target could have (and quite frankly, should have) been adjusted to reflect the fact that the entire country is taking a week off.

And yet here we stand again, my 4^th Spring Festival at this company, now more stressed and overworked that any of the prior three, due to the shortsighted implementation of this policy, and its disregard for an annual, completely foreseeable schedule break on its teaching staff. Meanwhile, senior management will be enjoying extended vacations, with no compulsory makeups, or near-unattainable revenue targets hanging over their heads and paychecks.

Again, I’ve come to tolerate the policy of holidays merely being deferred classes, with little more than grumbles and a resigned shrug. That makes a level of financial sense, even if it is unorthodox. What I am perplexed and frustrated by, rather, is the myopic implementation of this revenue-target system, and the unnecessary additional level of stress it puts on teachers and center managers to not only make up all holiday classes – but to also do so by the 27^th of that given month. For a school like Xinzhuang or Xuhui, with their large number of classes and staff, and therefore relative flexibility with scheduling, the stress may be less. I cannot speak for them, but for a small, slow-growth school like Chunshen, it adds a completely arbitrary and unjustifiable deadline to complete these makeups.

While I hope that my words might find a receptive pair of eyes, my experience with the managerial structure of the company tells me I’m far more likely to get a nicely-worded brush-off and be promptly forgotten in the name of slightly better returns on paper, and positions above my own receiving congratulatory bonuses for effectively manipulating my and others’ schedules to make the returns looks nicer.  I hope this is not the case, and that there might be a real and serious look into the value vs. cost ratio of this policy from an HR standpoint, rather than merely a bottom line view. I simply wish to make clear my concerns and frustrations regarding this policy, and the unwarranted additional stress it places on my coworkers and me. I do not question the financial sense of requiring makeups for even national holidays at this time… but I strenuously question the sense of mandating that it be done in the same financial month, especially for a holiday of the length of Spring Festival.

It is my sincere hope that, if nothing else, future holidays may be planned for in advance and have the arbitrary “revenue target” adjusted accordingly to reflect that schedule disruption, rather than forcing teachers and administrators alike to frantically compress a large number of classes into an extremely limited timeframe, or face the punitive action of a reduced paycheck.  It would not cost the company money, and it would certainly make many employees dread national holidays a little less.  They would still be rescheduling nightmares in the name of naked profit, but they would at least be on our – the teachers’ and local-level staff’s – terms time-wise, rather than that of an arbitrary monthly deadline.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

(CS) TAW Out.
LYRIC HERE

How Not to Blackmail your Company

Imagine you own a significant share in a major business venture – let’s say, oh, 30%.  Now let’s visualize the other 70% being held by an multinational conglomerate by the name of, oh, I don’t know… “Learson Pongman”… a publishing and education company which has its tentacles in over 70 countries and has had business dealings with my own country-of-residence for something on the order of half-a-century.

What do you do?

If your answer if to kick back, relax, and let the virtually assured dividends come rolling in… well congratulations.  Your brain is officially working normally.  Let me present you with this laurel, and hardy handshake.

If, however, your answer was to resist the 70% ownership at every turn (after, y’know, selling that 70%) over a period of 3 years, and then – and this is where it gets good - try (unsuccessfully) to fire those who disagreed/were not intimidated by you, and then unlawfully detain/imprison the president of the Asian branch of the parent company, his staff and lawyer in your office for a period of hours, under guard… well, then hello to my now former general manager and welcome to my page.  I do hope you enjoy it, given that you’re newly unemployed, and may soon be facing jail time for, well, basically going off the deep-end.

In my extended stay at – let’s drop the transparent euphemisms, shall we? – Pearson, I’ve been privy to quite a few power struggles, shifts, and complete reversals of direction.  I’ve seen promises broken, words revoked, ignored, and the supposed “values” of the company outright ignored in the interest of something called “guanxi,” which is to say, “face, relations, connections.”  I’ve become accustomed to a multinational company from the UK being run in a quintessentially – and I mean this in an entirely negatively fashion – Chinese way.  The semi-corrupt, completely opaque bureaucracy that governed my work environment had long-since become old hat.  I tolerated it because, by and large, I was able to ignore it, and the upper echelons largely ignored my backwater campus as being just too darned inconveniently located to actually come and enforce everything.

And yet, as of Tuesday, I bore witness to something completely new.  And found myself utterly dumbfounded at the machinations that unfurled quite literally before my eyes.  Nancy and Caelan had boarded their train for Wenzhou, and I’d returned home to wile away the remaining hours of the day with WoW, Skyrim, or whatever else might strike my fancy.  And so, there I was doing my best not to become food for a frost troll, when my cell phone began thrumming away with a series of texts.  It was a series of messages resembling something the Enigma Machine might churn out than an official company SMS.  It came in 4 parts, crudely cut apart at random places, and then delivered in reverse order.  Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued.  I had, along with the rest of the staff, been “invited” to a meeting at the headquarters with the aforementioned President of Pearson Asia Pacific.  Now, to explain, this was very strange because I had until now never been “invited” to any function other than the annual party.  Meeting times and places were simply sent out via email and through the local center managers that “there will be a meeting at…” and sometimes that we were “required” to attend.  Further, I had never before received a text message from the company.  It was a degree of sophistication upper management had simply lacked.  And finally, the invitation was for that very day… and while I’ve long since grown used to the Chinese vagaries regarding future-planning, this level of immediacy was again unprecedented.

So I bid my dark elf goodbye and trekked out to People’s Square out of little more than sheer curiosity.  Arriving at the building, I was greeted by a few of my coworkers hailing others down with directions.  The meeting at HQ, they relayed to me, had been cancelled and the center closed entirely.  The Asia Pacific President, Mr. Dugie Cameron and his entourage had relocated to a 3^rd floor restaurant of the nearby shopping mall, where they awaited anyone who might show up.

Once assembled, he relayed the tale of sorrow and woe to us all: he had flown in from Hong Kong to try to solve a rather grave crisis of leadership at the managerial level, one which put the entire operation in Shanghai at risk.  It seemed that somewhere in the byzantine bureaucracy of the Ministry of Education, there was some mid-level official who had taken a rather intense dislike to the fact that Pearson was operating in Shanghai/China.  So much so that when the school had to renew its license to operate in the city, this person had stipulated they would not authorize any renewal if the name “Pearson” was still attached to the company.  Now of course, the “whys” of it is sheer speculation – perhaps he’d been bribed to do exactly that, perhaps he was a jaded former customer hell-bent on revenge, perhaps an alien parasite invaded his brain and turned him into a drone for the hive cluster.  Regardless, on the last day of the year the renewal had finally gone through – with the Pearson brand stripped from it.  The general managers/minority shareholders/husband-wife pair in change of negotiations had essentially promised that Pearson was going to be removed entirely from its operation in Shanghai.

Obviously, that didn’t sit too well with the company as a whole.  And thus Mr. Cameron flew in to deal with the rogue duo face-to-face, lawyer in tow.  I’m sure expected a fair amount of static, posturing, and heated negotiation.  What they certainly had not expected was to be locked away in the office building, and placed under guard for a period of hours, and denied access to communication devices.  Yeah, that’s a no-no.  I’m not sure what the Chinese word for “false imprisonment” and “kidnapping” are, but they’re definitely on the books as a general “bad idea.”  After the cleaning lady finally came along and unlocked the door from the outside, they relocated to said restaurant.

As for the mysterious text message, apparently the normal company email system had been taken over by the duo, who had managed to acquire sole administrator-level access of the system.  There were able then to monitor, and block, any mail they so chose.  Thus, they’d been able to effectively close down the primary means of intercompany communication.  Mr. Cameron had been forced to reroute the messages about the meeting through his Hong Kong office using available cellphone contact info.

But that wasn’t the end of the paranoid craziness that had seized the GMs.  After the negotiations broke down into kidnapping, they had tried to terminate several of the upper-level staff for being “pro-Pearson” and attempted with some success to intimidate the center managers into not attending the meeting.  Several had been cowed into coming out on the side of the GMs.  Talk about backing the wrong horse.  As for the “firings,” well it turns out it’s rather difficult to fire someone who doesn’t work for you.  The employees had been hired and brought in by Pearson, thus nullifying the monomaniacal purge it seems the GMs had envisioned.

From the sounds of it, the ex-GMs had been blackmailing the company, hoping for a big payday – to the turn of $50,000,000 (yes, that’s in USD) – to make them go away.  Well, now they’re more likely to be going away for quite a while… to prison.

The open question at this point is, what becomes of the company?  The license to operate was procured under false pretenses – no, the 70% multinational shareholder did not simply raise anchor and disappear over the horizon.  So there is the possibility that the Ministry of Education may follow the letter of the law and begin proceedings to close the school down.  That, however, is relatively unlikely.  For one, it seems there is only one MoE official who took issue with Pearson’s ownership in the country.  Everyone else they’ve contacted in the Ministry seems to think there shouldn’t be a problem… so it may be as simple as just resubmitting the application to someone else.  For another, Pearson is not simply the owner of Longman Schools; they own at least two other school chains throughout the country, including the giant Wall Street English.  They create tens of thousands of jobs – most of which are for local staff, rather than foreign experts such as myself.  The company’s ability to generate currency is rather substantial, and to jeopardize that would be unwise for an economy in a precarious position.  On a related point, the last thing the Chinese government needs at the moment is yet more bad press, especially when it comes to foreign investment.  With competing entities like Disney and English First having equal stakes in the ESL industry, rocking that boat could have a significant ripple effect.  Suffice it to say, methinks this will all pan out in the end.

Still, it’s been a very interesting few days – especially since the company annual party was held the day after this all went down, including the two GMs in question.  Believe me, there were quite a few people waiting for that ball to drop (alas, it never did).  In my wildest dreams, I see there being a substantive shift in company policy away from the profit-at-all-cost mentality of the former head.  But hey, I’m not fool, and I know that it’s just as likely (in fact, much moreso) that barring a new name at the top of the billing, the status quo is likely to remain firmly intact.

Time will tell.

(CS) TAW Out.
LYRIC HERE

Unsinkable: The Price of Harmony in the PRC

It was just over a year ago that the newest and shiniest of Shanghai’s sprawling 400+km Metro system had its limited opening to passengers. Line 10 was hailed as a technological leap forward in mass-transit: fully automated (able to be operated without human drivers even!), with the latest in security and safety features... and most importantly, German-designed. It was virtually impossible to malfunction, much less crash. Even direct human error would be overridden by the sophisticated computers and tracking systems in place. I was thrilled because, at the time, my family and I were living less than a block away from one of the Line 10 stations. It was a huge convenience, since the next-closest Metro line was a 20-minute walk.

In late September, two trains on Line 10 collided. The crash left at least than 271 people injured, about 20 critically. Fortunately, as yet, no one is reported as having died. I’ve long since stopped using Line 10 at all, since having moved to a different district of the city, and yet the implications – and tacit fear – hit me all the same. I could well have been riding that train… and further, who’s to say the trains I do ride might not be at risk of a similar or worse accident? More than anything, though, I simply shake my head and sigh as this latest near-tragic chapter of China’s breakneck modernization unfolds. And many Chinese, much like me, see this as a horrifying – but unsurprising – development… the cost of growth, perhaps.

This is hardly, after all, a singular occurrence. In some ways – too many ways - it rings of “déjà vu all over again.” Just two months ago – in an incident that again hit far too close to home for my comfort – a two high-speed trains on the Shanghai-Wenzhou railway collided amid a thunderstorm, injuring hundreds and killing an official “40” people (though there is widespread belief that the real fatality count will never be released). This occurred less than a week before my wife and child were planning to take that very train line down to her hometown, with me following a few days later. They ended up taking a plane, while I gulped and boarded the train by myself… a thankfully completely uneventful trip to and from.

Still, that’s pretty small comfort. I arrived in China in the immediate aftermath of the infamous melamine-milk scandal of 2008, read about the near-completed apartment complex which collapsed on a man due to shoddy construction materials, watched on the news about another apartment complex going up in flames due to – you guessed it – shoddy, unlicensed renovations, read about bridges and half-finished freeways collapsing because of… well, you get the picture. Most recently (save for the Line 10 accident) I read the sickening reports of a “crackdown” on so-called “gutter oil.” This is used cooking oil fished from gutters, sewers, drains, et al, illegally “processed” to “clean” it, and then sold to restaurants at rock-bottom prices (gee, wonder why). It’s estimated that perhaps one in ten businesses have used or are using gutter oil in some capacity. Yum.

My point is that cutting corners in ways that can lead to tragedy, sickness, and death is not just some one-off for China – it’s business as usual; a product of both corrupt business practices, and a corrupt bureaucracy of governance… but more than anything widespread societal acceptance that “this is normal.” It is simply understood that these sorts of things are the cost of advancement, of modernization. Of course, there is public backlash whenever anything goes wrong. The guilty (or perceived guilty) parties are paraded forth to deliver Jerry Falwell-esque “I have sinned” repentance speeches, and then “justice” is doled out. Be it merely losing their job or prison, or execution at a speed that would make even a Texan’s head spin, the case is closed and everyone else keeps right on fishing for gutter oil.

Why is this? Why is there no discernable shift in attitudes when these things crop up? I’ve already mentioned the cultural shrug-off of it being “the cost of progress,” but I think it’s more than that. In part, I’d say it has to do with the opaque implacability of the CCP – at virtually every level. Be it the local police force, or the People’s Congress, there is no Chinese C-SPAN (or Daily Show to help parse it) monitoring and recording what happens (or doesn’t happen) in those glorious and harmonious halls. The populace at large simply does not know, and has no way of knowing what their government is doing… and consequentially has long ago given up caring. This is completely by design.

The government of the PRC seems to have found a winning combination – the holy grail of a techno-auto-bureaucratic regime. The recipe for one-party success has deceptively few steps, but appears to be surprisingly difficult to actually balance (see: Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, et al).

Step 1) Grow the economy, always. People without jobs are people planning insurrection. As long as most of the people feel their lives are better this year than last year, and their children are doing better than their parents, they will not want to rock that boat. Under no circumstances should the economy be allowed to contract. In the event of a global financial meltdown, which would shutter huge swaths of your export and manufacturing-driven economy, force the banks to give huge loans to keep those industries afloat. Oh, that leads me to…

Step 2) Control the finances. The banks are state-owned, or at the very least a joint-venture with the govt. When Beijing says start shelling out the bucks, they don’t demure and whine about profit margins… they salute and say “How much, sir?” This works even better if…

Step 2.5) Don’t block the media, be the media. At first glance – and to many Chinese, their only view ever – China doesn’t censor. They’ve got news, they report bad things that happen, conduct interviews, and there are multiple news channels and internet outlets with different reports. There are newspapers that report more conservatively than others, and some that report things at the borders of tolerability. They’ve even got a Facebook clone (Renren) and a Twitter clone (Weibo). And they’re all owned, operated, and policed by – you guessed it – the gub’ment.

Step 3) What You Can’t Control, Remove. – The title of the previous step is misleading… China censors… big time. There is an entire massive industry surrounding the manipulation and denial of information. From the vast and seemingly-random swaths of the internet blockaded by the Great Firewall, to web forum/blog “Harmonizers” empowered to moderate, change, or straight up delete posts deemed “unharmonious” (read: potentially anti-Beijing/Party), to the semi-infamous “Fifty-Cent Party” which has nothing to do with promoting the thug life of Curtis James Jackson III, and everything to do with acting as a paid army of commentators who’s job it is to steer online discussion into government-friendly territory, and are paid by the post. You can even find their usually ham-fisted attempts to do the same in English any time an article relating to China appears on Time or CNN. Fortunately they’re pretty easy to spot as their arguments consist overwhelmingly of misspelled hyper-patriotic Chinglish to the tune of “y u westrenrs no like harmonious China? Leave glorious PRC alone evil white guizi!”

Back when the so-called Arab Spring was just gaining steam in Tunisia and Egypt, and when Ghadaffi was still sporting ridiculous floral print dresses in Libya, some Chinese netizens started calling for a similar protest movement in China, dubbing it a “Jasmine Revolution.” They called for large-scale gatherings in cities all over the country, in public places a la Tahrir Square. Naturally the CPC took a measured, appropriate response of A) deleting all mention of the protests, B) arresting anyone who showed up to the designated protest area… even though it was a KFC (and Chinese people love KFC), and C) completely blocking the term “jasmine” from the internet. That’s right – in a country where jasmine is a popular tea, a pretty flower, and the English name of every fifth girl – they eradicated the word based on the postings of about a half-dozen dissidents.

And finally, Step 4) Turn official corruption into a game of Russian roulette – Official corruption is a redundancy in the PRC. Forget what you think you know about Rod Blagojevich or Bernie Madoff… they’re small fries, amateurs. The entire Chinese economic machine is oiled with the grease of back-room dealings, black market trade, mafia money, and cutting every conceivable corner while paying the official in charge of oversight to take a 4-month bathroom break. As I mentioned before, it’s long past the point of a running joke… it’s just too blasé to be funny or interesting to most people anymore. It is the “take my wife…please!” of China. So in a system powered entirely by the unholy combination of Ayn Rand’s wet dream and The Godfather Pts. 1 & 2 (seriously, screw part 3), how can the government maintain the façade of accountability and, y’know, not being essentially a national-scale Triad organization… without grinding their economy to a screeching halt (remember Step 1, after all)?

Simple! Just turn the act of being a government official, tycoon, or wealthy person in general into a big lottery: everyone gets to make as much free black-market money as they can, become as corrupt and unaccountable as possible… and when something goes wrong, the guy who pulls the short straw gets shot and his family stripped of everything it every owned. In this instance, “pulling the short straw” means not having enough connections and strings to pull to buck the blame onto someone else, or crossing someone more important than you. And instead of being fitted for a pair of concrete shoes, or a “leave the gun, take the cannoli” drive out to the countryside, the poor Luca Brasi in question is paraded through the legal system as an embodiment of “justice” and “anticorruption” before being taken behind a chemical shed and shot. Oh, and then his family is sent a bill for the bullet. Seriously.

A good friend of mine and I recently got together at one of the only places in Shanghai that brews anything other that Budweiser-clone pilsner, somewhere between the second and fourth pitcher of Imperial Stout our conversation turned to this very topic. He’s Chinese and studied law in college in hopes of becoming a policeman, and worked in a government office for a while before deciding that wasn’t his thing. His girlfriend is an intern at a large Shanghai legal firm. Suffice it to say, what he has to say on the topic is something worth taking with more than a grain of salt. I’m paraphrasing, but in essence he said the majority of legal work, deals, and trials have almost nothing to do with case law, precedent, or evidence… but on who you know, and your (the lawyer/firm’s) relationship with the judge presiding. Though he and his girlfriend have enough firsthand knowledge to make a pretty convincing case by themselves, he went further and told me this wasn’t just the de facto situation, but what he was actually taught in school. I have to imagine the curriculum looked something like:
Chinese Law 101: It Isn’t What You Know, It’s Who You Know
Legal Ethics 215: LOL… C’mon, Seriously Now…
Trial Law 347: How Schmoozing the Judge Can Get You Acquittals/Convictions
Trial Law 401: Evidence Suppression and You

Now this is the part where I’m supposed to have some sort of grandiose solution to this list of issues: A Grand Unified Theory of Fixology. Well, I don’t… no one does. That is also by design. I’m an outsider looking in, simply blinking rapidly and marveling at the sheer enormity of the system in place and – for better and for worse – its own complex system for self-preservation. It’s a fascinating organism, the PRC: a society and government body based on the bones of a Confucian/Imperial mix of meritocracy and patronage, the organs of a Soviet/Maoist-style autocracy, and the muscles of Den Xiaoping’s “socialist market economy,” and all that under the thin, transparent skin of a “Republic.” While the rest of the Soviet bloc have long since crumbled to dust, the PRC keeps chugging along, using its own peculiar ability to adapt with the times to remain relevant and in power. And me? I’m just, for the time being, along for the ride, enjoying the benefits of being somewhere between a panda and a space alien in terms of coolness, and making sure to only buy my kid formula that’s been imported from the West. No melamine in my son’s diet, thanks.

(CS) TAW Out.

Musings of a Saturday Evening

July winds down towards its conclusion, and – save for the hellacious heat/humidity combo – it scarcely seems summer’s almost come and gone already. There was, not too terribly long ago, a drastic schedule change between summer, and those other three forgettable seasons. Now, - again, save for the mercury levels that would have Beelzebub sweating – it’s all just one relatively undifferentiated week from another.

It was yesterday that I officially renewed my contract with Longman Schools in Shanghai (I’ve been advised not to use "re-signing", as all too often I omit the hyphen, and it looks like I’m quitting). I’d made an appointment for 1:00, and soon found that apparently so had everyone else in the company. Shuffled from one office to another, and then shunted out of that because some hypersensitive Chinese teacher found my silent contract-signing too disturbing for her lilac of a student, it took a good 45 minutes to complete what would have, under normal circumstances, taken 15, maybe 20.

It’s the rare occasion that I’m exposed to other campuses. I’ve managed to carve an extremely insular niche at my own Chunshen campus, and consequentially am only occasionally exposed to the “rest” of the company. So infrequent is it that it can become all-too-easy to forget why I’ve spent the last two years doing so. This was a reminder. These people are crazy, and I’m lucky enough to have shielded myself from the majority of their nuttiness.

Still, I’ve come to the tentative decision that this may well be our last year in China (this is not, by the way, a unilateral decision). As accustomed as I’ve become to the country, there’s still a large piece of me that longs to return. This is assuming, of course, that there will be anything more than a smoking ruin to return to. That’s in large part why I signed on for another year. My intent is to try to ride this whole suicidal populist groundswell out from a safe distance. If in the next week or two the whole thing willfully goes to shit, well, viva la China. If somehow this whole default catastrophuck blows over, then homecoming is a very real option.

I’ve managed to complete my preliminary iteration of my Apples to Apples clone, and now just need to find the time to get it printed on the company’s dime. I’ve not done a page could, but 20+ full color would not be surprising, potentially double-sided… and then there’s lamination to consider. Makes me thankful I can write this off as a company expense.


(CS) TAW Out.

I'm glad I didn't know the way it all would end

Lions, and Contracts, and Beers! Oh my!

I'm in the process of "feeling out" the new MacOS - Lion... I think I'll call mine Mufasa!...Oooooohhhhhh... Do it again! Mu-Fa-Saaaa!! So far it's quite nice, and quite a good deal at $29.99. There's still a few features to get used to, though. The biggest on is the trackpad... they've decided to reverse it... so now down is up and up is down. It fits with their iPad-ization of the OS, but it's still a little disorienting. I'm still occasionally wondering why the hell the page won't scroll down... and then realize it's because I'm pushing the wrong way. Doh.

I've just concluded my latest round of contract negotiations. Though I'd been pursuing the idea of striking out on my own, it turns out it wasn't as simple as all that. Due to certain less-than-reputable individuals scamming customers and fleeing the country, the barrier to enter into the English business has increased dramatically. On a single salary, with a little guy, it's just not feasible at the moment to try to lay down all that groundwork.

So instead, Pearson and I hammered out a new deal... I got a 15-20% raise, depending on the numbers used (it's complicated), and I essentially will just keep on keeping on. We'll be moving out of Nancy's uncle's apartment in August, and so we're in the beginning stages of looking for a "new pad." I've made it clear what I require from any potential apartment:
1) rent at or below 4000/month... it can take some effort and negotiation, but it's feasible...
2) preferably at or south of Xujiahui... I wanna be close enough to work...
3) north of Shanghai South Station... but not so far from city center...
4) As close to Line 1 Metro as possible... no more 20 minute walks to and from the subway, tyvm.

In other news, I've been drawn into a family semi(not really)-competitive "cookoff" and have, as a consequence, decided to "up my game," both in terms of food I'm making, and the beers with which to wash it down. As a result, I've been discovering some of the remarkably delicious brews available to those willing to track them down in Shanghai :) It's not all Tsingtao and Suntory, after all!

(CS) TAW Out.

Hello again, friend of a friend